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The Bourne Ultimatum

By: M.V. Moorhead

August 4, 2007

Matt Damon has been
knocking around movies for nearly 20
years now, and he’s been a star for
at least a decade, since the
overrated Good Will Hunting.
For much of that time, though, he’s
suffered from a sort of Leonardo
DiCaprio-it is — he seemed like a
callow, unformed boy playing at
being an adult. When he was
effective in earlier years, it was
in roles that exploited this, like
his fine title turn in The
Talented Mr. Ripley.

Also like DiCaprio,
in more recent years he’s managed to
shake this boy-in-oversized-shoes
quality. His role (opposite DiCaprio)
in Scorcese’s The Departed
has helped with this, but it’s his
startling command as Robert Ludlum’s
existential spy hero Jason Bourne in
The Bourne Identity (2002)
and The Bourne Supremacy
(2003) that’s really made him grow
into a tough guy.

Seeing Damon in
action as Bourne on a big-screen TV,
one of the characters in The
40-Year-Old Virgin sums up the
shift in perception when he remarks
“Y’know, I always thought that Matt
Damon was like a Streisand, but I
think he’s rockin’ the [house] in
this one!”

He rocks it again in
The Bourne Ultimatum, the
third entry in the successful
franchise. He doesn’t have all that
many lines here—the expository
duties are handled by such pros as
Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Albert
Finney and Scott Glenn.

Damon’s Bourne,
meanwhile, spends most of his
footage stalking through streets and
alleys and back hallways and over
rooftops, dodging relentless CIA
surveillance and cold-eyed assassins
across London, Madrid, Tangier and
New York, as he continues his quest
to find out who he is and who turned
him into a programmed amnesiac
killer.

You can see Bourne’s
haunted unhappiness on Damon’s
pug-nosed pan, which is cragging up
a little—from cute to truly
handsome—as his 30s progress. But
the actor doesn’t milk it; he has a
becoming reticence here, almost as
if he were deliberately angling his
face away from the camera.

As solid a star
presence as Damon is, though, The
Bourne Ultimatum draws its
energy from the headlong direction
of Paul Greengrass, the Englishman
who also helmed Supremacy and
who made such a pulse-pounding
experience of United 93.

Greengrass likes to
work with rapid-fire cuts and a lot
of shaky hand-held camera, but he
never gets so caught up in this
razzle-dazzle that we lose track of
what’s going on. Although Julia
Stiles is back as Bourne’s ally, the
two aren’t allowed a love scene—the
movie never really slows down for
more than a quick breath between a
series of set-piece action scenes.

An early one, through
Waterloo Station in London, is
particularly gripping.

On the whole, this is
the best action picture I’ve seen in
a long time — at least since Quentin
Tarantino’s Death Proof,
which didn’t get going until its
last 20 minutes.

The Bourne film goes
on, perhaps, a few minutes too long,
and in the New York scenes toward
the end it grows a little cheeky in
the James Bond manner, with Bourne
engaging in death-defying derring-do
that made me strain to keep my
disbelief suspended.

Ultimatum
also persists in a certain silly but
touching naiveté: The plot hinges,
in part, on the premise that if the
public were to learn, through the
media, that our intelligence
community was engaging in torture
and murder, there’d be prompt
congressional hearings and
indictments.

It’s a charmingly
dated notion, like the belief that
true love conquers all.